Clark's lawyer killed it.

This is what happened on Tuesday when Mayor Clark went to court to get a judicial review on the sanctions. The rules of the broadcast were that no one could record it, and I didn't, so this is from memory. If you have anything useful to add to my assessment, pls feel free. TLDR: Clark's lawyer killed it.

The City’s lawyers went first, and had only two things to say: (1) the City and its Councillors have a right to do everything they did, and here's a bunch of citations to prove it; and (2) what happened at the Aug 21 meeting should be seen as a Personal Evaluation of Mitchell, which is an HR matter, and therefore shouldn't have happened at a council meeting, and therefore everything else that happened doesn't count. It's an HR matter, period.

And that was the City’s whole case.

Then came Clark's lawyer:

For starters, he did a great job telling us the story - and the mystery - of the Legal Opinion from the city Solicitor. It's important, this document, for a lot of reasons, and it's a huge hole in the city's case. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.  Once Upon a Time....

Ann Mitchell, the City Manager, undertook a reorganization that she knew to be improper, even technically illegal. She had no reason to be worried, though, because Robert Dumanowski and Darren Hirsch had told her they always did things this way, and Shila Sharps, wanting so bad to be one of the boys, spat a luger into her palm and put-er-there. "That deals's done on a wink and a handshake," thought Sharps. "I have arrived in the halls of power, baby." McGrogan took everyone out for drinks after. Business as usual.

Ann Mitchell, naturally, trusted in the cover provided by these powerful people. The reorg proceeded over the course of several months. There were some meetings along the way, and the two sides disagree what happened in them. The City says that before the Aug 21 meeting, Clark had plenty of opportunity to hear and question what was going on, and she didn't do that. On the other hand, Clark's lawyer says that Clark was Alice in Wonderland with a law degree, and once she understood what was going on, she tried her damnedest to stop it, fix it, understand it...whatever. She used her time in those meetings to pinch herself and the rest of them and say "WTF guys? Y’all are acting like an old school boy’s club, this isn’t the right way to do things." They all shrugged. Nobody kept any minutes of these meetings.

Well, Clark’s a lawyer, AYK, and at some point she asked "Are y'all sure this is even legal?" And Mitchell, so sure of the protection provided by McGrogan, Dumanowski and Hirsch's massive manhoods, looked contemptuously at Clark and said "Back off, bitch, I have a legal opinion from the City Solicitor."

And that, dear reader, was a blunder so fatal I'm amazed Ann Mitchell is still in town.

This is a great story and you should get it somewhere else because its telling is beyond my capabilities. The important takehome is that, if that document was real, then Clark's whole range of options, her whole understanding of what is "the right thing to do now" is massively affected. And it is shocking that Clark found herself so suspicious of Ann Mitchell that she couldn’t just accept her word, she had to ask to see the Opinion. (It’s like your spouse telling you where they were, but you checked their GPS anyway.)

But of course, Mitchell didn’t provide the document.

And then, by horrifying degrees, Clark realizes that (A) there is no legal opinion, and (B) that means Mitchell just lied about it to everyone's face, and (C) nobody seems to care.

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Let's see, what else? He also did a very smooth job of shredding the Kingsgate report, and note that "shredding" is my word, because the way he speaks is always polite and controlled. What he did was refer multiple times to Kingsgate over the course of the day, and each time he poked another hole in Kingsgate, and he did it so well that by the end of the day, without using any strong language or hyperbole, Kingsgate was in shreds.

The City, shockingly I thought, had no response to this. Kingsgate was the sole and only legal support for the sanctions, and the city let Clark's lawyer treat it like a pinata, and they said nothing. 

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What else? The judge never scolded Clark's lawyer, and that was impressive, because a judge can scold whoever they want. The city's lawyers got scolded a few times about not having records of Council's decision processes. 

This was also a big loss for the city: None of the important meetings had minutes - all they had was resolutions. The city's lawyers insist "Council has the right to have meetings and not take any notes, but only release a decision; and they also have the right to impose the sanctions." And the judge was like "You guys weren't ordering wall paper for the bathroom, these were big decisions and it looks like you just went down a list ticking boxes." When the city's lawyers tried introducing things from these meetings into the record the judge shut them down. “How can we put these things you’re telling me into the record when you don’t have any minutes?”

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Oh, this was great, too - somehow Clark's lawyer used timeline to show that Council had already decided on the sanctions before they even got the Kingsgate report. That was brilliant, although I can’t remember how it was done. (if you want to play at home, put these events each on a set of cards:

-Kingsgate report received

-Council agrees to pay for Ann Mitchell's lawyers

-Council declines to pay for Clark's lawyers

-Meeting to decide sanctions

-Sanctions levied

-Aug 21 council meeting

- and a partridge in a pear tree. In the right order, those events make council a hit squad. I bet kelly allard can do it, and I’m sure the judge can, too.

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The judge noted that the actual events that started all this took 2 or 3 minutes during a council meeting, and for the next hour, the Mayor ran the rest of the meeting in a manner that was above criticism. Clark's lawyer also spent a few breaths also on this point - that since this started Clark has done everything that could be asked or expected or her, but it was cool that the judge took note that herself.  

Now I think of it, I just realized that the City never went after her, so Dumanowski obviously wasn’t consulted about defense strategy.

But seriously folks, with Clark's lawyer scoring some easy points talking about Clark's irreproachable behavior (well, irreproachable unless you're Dumanowski, who never met a female mayor he didn't hate to the core of his being. But I digress...) with Clark's lawyer scoring easy points, it could been seen as fair, if sickening, for the city's lawyers to attack her personally, and they didn't do that. That's cool. Thanks, team.

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What else?  Oh yeah. On the Aug 21 vid a couple times where Mitchell said "My bad, I forgot the step. If there's been a mistake that's on me." That's a part of the video that makes Mitchell look good; taking responsibility for errors on her watch.

What Clark's lawyer did with that is say you can't have it both ways. First of all, that was the first time Mitchell ever said anything about a mistake - up until this time the reorg had been happening all around them and as far as anyone's words and actions indicated (Hirsch and Dumanowski had both just finished heaping praise on Mitchell for a job well done), this is all according to the rules. Or according to the Plan. Or according to Dumanowski. It's actually not clear, because they didn't keep minutes of their meetings. 

So, says Clark's lawyer, you can't pretend for months that everything is fine, and only on the last day say, "Oops, if I forgot anything I'm sorry." and yet still claim that you got a legal opinion about it weeks or months ago. Either you thought it was wrong or you didn't. If you asked for a legal opinion, you must have been worried about something.

Unless, of course, there is no opinion and you just lied through your teeth.

<<Mayor Clark, I'm sorry this happened to you. No employee of our city should have to put up this kind of gaslighting and abuse. And can you believe it? We’re still only at the part of the story where everyone is gaslighting you and creeping around in dark hallways. The open attacks on you haven’t even begun yet. Tell you what, I'm gonna give you a free T-shirt. It’s the least I can do.>>

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I don’t remember a lot of time spent in the review about the famous Aug 21 meeting video, which is fine, because if you’re reading this you’ve seen the video. One subtle thing I want to mention is that this hearing I watched on Tuesday was an all-lawyer event: no laymen, no witnesses or goofy idiots for some once-in-a-lifetime interaction with the courts. Everyone involved was a lawyer, and that very much affected the language used.

It went on for hours and was never emotional, always restrained, always disciplined. But over the course of the day there was an obvious trend toward the City looking childish and Clark looking victimized, and, picking up on this trend, Clark’s lawyer shifted in the final minutes toward language like “mind-boggling, unprecedented, vindictive, punitive, abhorrent…” that sort of thing. And when he did that, there was no pushback whatsoever, from either the City or the judge.

It’s over. Clark won.

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